Medical doctors act as agents of their patients by either treating them directly orreferring them to other more or differently specialized doctors, who therebybecome “agents of agents”. The main aim of this paper is to model centralaspects of such two-layered agency relations in the medical...

Social institutions regulating group conduct have been regarded as necessaryfor human cooperation to transcend family bonds. However, manystudies in economics and biology indicate that reciprocity based on repeatedinteraction suffices to establish cooperation with non-kin. We shedlight on the...

Leadership is important for the well-functioning of organizations. Weexamine the effects of leadership on contributions in public goods experiments.Leadership by example is implemented by letting one groupmember contribute to the public good before followers do. Such leadershipincreases...

A robust nding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initialcontribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports onan exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design:The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concernand the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concernand umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of...

We consider a society composed of two regions. Each of them pro-vides a public good whose benefits reach beyond local boundaries.In case of decentralization, taxes collected by members of a regionare spent only on that region's public good. In case of centralization, tax receipts from the two...

Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

Based on an axiomatically derived provision rule allowing community members to endogenously determine which, if any, public project should be provided, we perform experiments where (i) not all parties benefit from provision, and (ii) the projects' costs can be negative. In the tradition of legal...

This paper derives and justifies a procedurally fair bidding mechanism and reviews experiments that apply the mechanism to public projects provision. In the experiments, not all parties benefit from provision, and the projects´ costs can be negative. The experimental results indicate that the...

This paper experimentally examines a procedurally fair provision mechanism allowing members of a small community to determine, via their bids, which of four alternative public projects to implement. Previous experiments with positive cost projects have demonstrated that the mechanism is...